Electro-Intrusion was selected among proposals submitted for FET Proactive Emerging Paradigms and Communities call (FETPROACT-EIC-07-2020), in subtopic B: Breakthrough zero-emissions energy storage and conversion technologies for carbon-neutrality.

Within the following 48 months, the Electro-Intrusion team will investigate triboelectrification in nanomaterials and its possible use for mechanical and thermal energy harvesting applications. Triboelectrictrification is a type of contact electrification, induced by a frictional contact between two materials after which one of them becomes electrically charged once being separated from the other. In everyday life, the phenomenon has been known to caused so-called static cling.

To be precise, Electro-Intrusion wants to investigate the phenomenon of nanotriboelectrification and heat extraction during non-wetting liquid intrusion-extrusion and to maximize electrical energy output for the benefit of wide range of mechanical and/or thermal energy harvesting applications. The project coordinator, Dr. Yaroslav Grosu explains it further:

“Using the process of intrusion-extrusion of a non-wetting liquid into-from nanoporous materials to generate electrical energy is a game-changer here. Not only nanoporous materials provide huge solid-liquid interfacial area for contact electrification, but endothermic cycle of intrusion-extrusion also permits harvesting environmental heat converting it into electricity. We expect that these two factors will enable energy harvesting with an unprecedented efficiency for a wide range of technologies where vibrations and heat are available in excess – from domestic devices to heavy machinery.”

The Electro-Intrusion team specifies their goals in the project proposal as following:

“Our overall objective is to go beyond the current paradigm of recovering dissipated mechanical energy by adding ambient heat into the conversion process and hence increasing the efficiency and decreasing energy consumption dramatically. The quantitative objective of the project is to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve mechanical-to-electrical conversion ratio higher than 100 % by utilizing a huge quantity of heat absorbed from the environment during intrusion-extrusion process.”

In practical view, the Electro-Intrusion will focus mainly on implementation of the above mentioned phenomenon within the automobile sector, because of a huge amount of available mechanical energy, which is typically dissipated, as is the case of shock absorbers. Therefore, the project team also wants to create an innovative prototype of this device. They precise:

“By developing a prototype in this project, we aim to make an appealing demonstration of the technology, which can effectively attract the attention of stakeholders, and setting the grounds for exploitation of project´s results within future industrial projects.”

Electro-Intrusion brought together a consortium of multidisciplinary teams across the Europe specializing in physics, chemistry, material science and engineering. The participants come from Spain, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, the United Kingdom and Belgium. The project is coordinated at CIC EnergiGUNE.

Background information

FET-Open and FET Proactive are now part of the Enhanced European Innovation Council (EIC) Pilot (specifically the Pathfinder), the new home for deep-tech research and innovation in Horizon 2020, the EU funding programme for research and innovation.